Festival of Creative Learning – The process: Part 1

We have been working with Snook to evolve Innovative Learning Week (ILW) into a Festival of Creative Learning. So far we have created a blueprint of the journey of the new festival, interviewed people involved with ILW 2016 (#ILW16) and had a design workshop with more key stakeholders from around the university to hear their thoughts and input about the best way forward with the festival.

As the week in February (previously inhabited by ILW) will be available for creative and innovative events in 2017, we started by considering what needs to be done in preparation for this as well as potential new features of the festival throughout the year.

Blueprinting at Snook’s offices.

Producing a blueprint is a really useful tool for a big project like this, particularly when you want to evolve and build on the best of what has already been done. Read more about how it works here.

After mapping our journey we interviewed 6 event organisers from ILW 2016. They all gave us useful feedback on both the positive and negative aspects of their ILW 2016 experience in addition to giving us ideas to improve The Festival of Creative Learning. The organisers had very positive feedback about the new resources (like the handbook and the meet-up schedule and agenda) that Snook worked with us to develop last summer.

Interviewing some of the ILW 2016 organisers

Interviewing the ILW 2016 organisers was a really great reminder too – to always check in with people you work with, and particularly the people using your service. To listen to their experience and hear more of their reasoning and what motivated them to get involved with ILW 2016 was very valuable. We got to hear about the impact that their events have had after ILW and how the experience of being event organisers has enhanced their general university experience. We’re excited to work with Snook  to take all this information forward into the structure of the new festival.

Watch this space for ‘Festival of Creative Learning – The process: Part 2’ to hear how the Design workshop went!

If you want to read about how our collaboration with Snook started, see the blogpost about us revamping ILW last year here and the decisions that came out of it here.

Also see our blogposts about last year’s blueprinting session and design workshop.

The impact report from ILW 2016 and more information about what Snook helped us build can be found here.

If you have any questions about The Festival of Creative Learning, please email creative.learning@ed.ac.uk.